Sew a Face Mask With Added Protection

[Music] hi my name is brenda miller from among brenda's quilts and bags and i have a shop called the abq sewing studio in strath-ray ontario canada and today i'm going to go over some instructions on how to make your own face mask using cloth but we're also using a special lining that will give your face mask more it's going to be more effective for it so um here is what it's based on the typical surgical mask that doctors and nurses use every day you know the ones with a little piece of metal in it to pinch your nose and the elastics to to hold it in place on your ears here is a finished face mask it has the the same metal it has the same elastic we're using cloth on the outside and cloth is not effective for controlling the spread of anything really because it's just too porous but in this case i'm using a product on the inside it's a laminated laminated product called pul which stands for polyurethane laminate and one side is quite impermeable so has kind of a plasticky finish and the other side is a woven side so it will hold a little bit of moisture from your breathing anyway let's get on with it i want to start by talking about the pul just a little bit more so as i said this is a laminate and it has a smooth side which is the impermeable side so nothing's going to pass through that and then it's it's laminated this oops got a little glitter on there it's laminated to this woven side of the fabric and then we're going to consider the woven side the right side of this particular product now this was developed for hospital use it can be sterilized so you know we're going to have to wash these masks every time we take them off so it's important that what you use is going to stand up to very hot water like i said it is impermeable so just as an example if i spray a liquid on this nothing's coming through to that other side i'll just wipe that off there we go and that's why this is going to be more effective than your typical cloth mask which is which is pretty much the same as pouring water through cheese cloth some of the germs are going to stick to the cheese cloth but most of them are going to just get through all the porous woven holes in the fabric but we do need something on the outside of our mask as well and that's where our fabric comes in so what you're going to need to do for cutting is cut out two pieces seven and a half by eight inches and then we're going to need two other pieces these are our binding pieces and they're measuring one and three quarter inches by five and a half inches and you'll need two of those as well along with that you're going to need some round elastic you may not have round elastic you may have some nice skinny flat elastic don't don't take anything too wide though because um nobody's going to be able to wear it it's going to hurt people's heads they're going to fuss with their masks and that really um negates the whole purpose of the mask you're not supposed to be touching it and adjusting the strings or whatever you're using around your ears i know a lot of people are just using wool that just seems pretty hopeless to me because you're going to be fussing with it so out of our elastic we need two nine inch long pieces and those are going to go around the ears in addition to that we have to have something that's going to pinch at the nose right so it fits onto your face so that the least amount of air possible is going to come through through the nose area and that piece of metal is going to fit in a little channel at the top of the mask so what are you going to use now i've seen a few ideas online people are using twist ties really they're not long enough they are not going to hold very well at all so i think you can just forget the twist ties some people are using pipe cleaners i know hospitals are saying please don't use pipe cleaners who knows why probably because they're they're fuzzy and you know are going to hold on to germs so what are you going to use you don't want to go out and hunt for things so i went into you know my drawers at home to see what i could find so wire wise i have floral wire which ought to work just fine but i also found this aluminum wire which is really very lightweight and pliable and i thought for my mask that's what i'd use so what you want to do with your wire you'll need some wire cutters is get yourself a piece of wire we're going to double it up because it's not not particularly strong by itself so what i want to do is measure out ten and a half inches of wire so that's about here i'm going to cut it with my wire cutters and then what i'm going to do is double it like i said and i'll fold it in half and i just want to make a little eyelet hole here give it a little twist there and then down at the other end i'm going to fold it back on itself and i'm going to twist that as well making another little eyelet and then we've got some ends here so they're sharp so i want to just pinch those together this eyelid is a bit too too wide so i'm just going to shut it a little and then we've got that eyelid on the other side and what you should have here should measure about four and a half inches in length okay so i've got a couple here on the go and that's what we're going to use for our little nose pincher area so again you could use floral wire um the important thing is that you pinch the ends so that they're not going to poke somebody in the nose and you know cause them injury all right you also need a darning needle we're going to need that to thread our elastic through the mask and it is very nice to have some wonder clips to hold everything together and some kind of an erasable marking tool okay so i've got a friction pin here so i'm sure you can kind of macgyver something together for your wire and if you don't have you know clips you can use you know hair clips or something you can use pins as well but just be careful not to poke holes any more than you have to through the pul because the whole point of this is it's impermeable and that's what's going to keep the germs away from you that's what you need so to start with i'm going to take my piece of outer fabric that measures seven and a half by eight inches and i'm going to take my pul which measures seven and a half by eight inches and i'm going to put it right sides together now remember the right side of the pul is not the plasticky side it's the woven side we want that side against our face we don't want the plasticy side against our face we want the plasticy side facing of the world around us okay so we put that together and um this will be that the seven inch the seven and a half inch edge is the top and the bottom of the mask and the uh eight inch sides are the sides of the mask so what we want to do is stitch a quarter inch seam across the seven and a half inch widths of the fabric now when i stitch this i like to put the pul side down it just feeds through the machine better once your two seven and a half inch sides are sewn together with quarter inch seams you can turn everything to the right side and you will know you have done this correctly with the pul if the shiny side shiny side's in and woven side is out facing out okay so now we're just going to press that seam flat and yes you can press pul because it is pretty heat sensitive now i'm not pressing directly on the plasticky side because that's inside here there's this layer of fabric over it i don't i don't think i'd want to press to this extent right on the shine or the you know the plasticy side of the pul anyway now that's flat okay so the next thing we're going to do is a stitch a 3 8 of an inch top stitching line along that top and bottom edge what i want to do is find the halfway point of this top piece of the mask so i just fold that top edge in half and with a removable marking tool i'm going to mark halfway so that i know that my little wire is centered okay i've got a string here that i can help me move that nose wire around with i guess i'll call it a nose wire i don't know what else to call it anyway i can insert it right through that channel we just sewed and kind of feed that in now i i what i'm wanting to do is center it so i'm going to just pull it back because i feel that i'm a little too far in already and then what i can do is fold it and i can feel where those ends are and and right now that's centered so perfect okay so that's where that needs to sit and now i'm just going to pull my string out i don't hopefully comes out hopefully yes it did so let's just check make sure this is still centered yeah okay so what i'm going to do now is i can feel where the metal ends so the metal is ending here and here and what i want to do now is just stitch on either side of that mark so that that knows a wire doesn't shift around in that uh channel when someone's wearing it we don't want it like skittering over here that's no use to anyone so that's what i'm going to do next i'm just going to sew across there alright so i've sewn in two spots there to hold that in place and i'm just going to snip off all those little whiskers of thread because less stuff sticking out of a mask the less to uh catch germs cut it that's pretty good okay so there's the top of our mask and it's all ready for somebody's nose to be uh fitted okay so now what we need to do is mark this mask because it needs to have some folds created all right what we want to do now is make some some pleats in our masks so that it fits our faces just like this one from a surgical mask okay so we need to draw lines and to do that we're going to use a grid cutting mat and a ruler and a removable pencil or marker in this case so i want to draw a line that is one and three-quarter inches from the bottom of the mask one and three-quarter inches and one that is three inches from the bottom of the mask one that is three and a half inches from the bottom of the mask one that is four and three quarters from the bottom of the mask one that is five and a quarter from the bottom of the mask five and a quarter and one that is six and a half inches from the bottom of the mask great so what we're going to do is fold down our top line to the next line down and using some clips hold that in place and then we're going to take our line down from there and fold it down all right oops just a layer there and we're going to take this line and fold it down [Music] there and there we go and then what we're going to do is we're going to baste along either side to hold those pleats in place and to baste you need to use a large or long stitch so i'm using a stitch length of five millimeters and we want to stitch about an eighth of an inch away from the edge of the fabric you can take these clips out as you go okay so there are all our pleats held in place and i can remove all these marks that i have here just with the heat of my iron the friction pen just makes those lines go away okay so now what we need to concern ourselves with are these raw edges of the mask and we need to finish them off so we'll take our binding strip pieces and we want to fold under one half inch to the wrong side i have this cool little pen here that helps me um fold under edges it's called a fabric folding pen let me sell those two online along with the pul and the elastic and everything else okay so that just relaxes the fabric and causes it to fold over so i don't have to bother with the iron okay now we want to put the binding on the wrong side of the piece we want to fold back our raw edges so that the binding is the same length as the the outer mask [Applause] and then i'm going to change my stitch length on my machine to the regular stitch length just sew that back in place now one thing you might want to do just to make things easier for your next step is to actually stitch across these edges just to close them off because we're going to channel the elastic uh through this after it's sewn down and you might just catch your catch yourself in the seam as you're trying to up with the elastic through so i have been doing that okay so now what we're going to do is take our binding and just fold it over and stitch along the very edge of the fold on both sides so [Music] okay not a big fan of contrasting thread but at least you can see what i'm doing right all right so now it is time to put the elastic through these side channels okay i'm going to be using a darning needle to thread the elastic through these side channels but if you've got a small safety pin that'll work too so here's how we just feed through the side channels and that's why i did that stitching on the edge because i don't want to get all bogged down in the different layers and not be able to find my way out the other end which can be pretty time consuming so hang on to this while you just pull the other end out or it's going to slide right back on you and then you're just going to knot it there and then the other side and then you're going to just work that knot into the channel so it's not in the way there that's gone now and we're still pretty lucky here we we have lots of masks at the hospitals but my understanding is not everyone is so lucky so anyway here we go got that nice nose and ears and this will fit nice and close you've got this fabric side of the pul facing your face and you've got the plasticky side facing you know the big bad world outside you so this should help a great deal and i hope i hope you uh make good use of this thanks and visit me anytime at among brenda's quilts and bags at www dot among brenda's quilts thanks a lot [Music] bye-bye [Music] you

Channel: Among Brenda's Quilts & Bags

Views: 27,358

Rating: 4.8029556 out of 5

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Id: YkrxgiXyaGo

Length: 21min 21sec (1281 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 29 2020